This is a rare one for me - a road car. My model club (Brooklyn Plastic Modeler's Society) is having an Aurora-themed contest in June. All entries will be Aurora kits or reboxes of them. The kit I've chosen is a Monogram rebox of the Aurora 1/24 Maserati 3500 GT. The kit has the Lucas mechanical fuel injection, making it a GTi. I'm calling it a 1962 as all the references I have (a video from Jay Leno's garage and a Bring a Trailer listing) are 1962 model years.

Here's the boxart, it's not great. As you can see, the wire wheels are pretty bad. I will be replacing them with a set of Borrani wheels from Fujimi - if I can find a set!

And here are the box contents. It looks like the parts have spent a long time jiggling around, with loose bits are scratches abound. I will sand and smooth out all of the bodywork before painting. But everything is there!

Since the front and rear clips are separate, the body requires some glueing and filling. Overall the body looks pretty good. I understand there are some shape accuracy issues, but I won't bother with that. I did have to add a thin piece of plastic card to get the grill opening to fit the grill itself.

After filling holes and gaps, I sanded the body with 500 grit sandpaper, then 600 and 1000. With opening doors, hood, and trunk, the only panel line on the body I had to be careful with was the gascap cover. You can see a healthy bead of C/A glue on the inside of the rear body shell.

I tackled the inside of the body before the outside. The headliner (and interior floor) is Tamiya acrylic Sky Blue toned down with some light grey. I then painted the rest of the inside of the body matte black. Here you get a good glimpse at my horribly messy desk.

I then primed the body with Mr. Primer Surfacer 1000 to fill any minor defects. After some light sanding in problem areas, I gave the body a healthy coat of Tamiya white fine primer.

I am going to do a two-tone paint scheme, with a cream white top and a metallic blue body. The first color to go on is TS-7 Racing White. I will airbrush a Mr. Color metallic blue in a few days.

Here's the interior floor. The other side is a semi-gloss black, and the interior side is the blue/grey mixture I used for the headliner.

I felt the floor was a little too dark, so I went over the whole thing with a wash of white to tone it down. Also pictured is the battery compartment door. I have a battery from my spares box and will build the whole compartment later on.

Most of the parts have now been given some paint. My references showed the underside of the chassis is almost entirely matte black, so I used up a lot of Tamiya acrylic flat black. The main chassis piece will get a few little details added in the future to make it more interesting.

Other bits got varying shades of silver/metal. Overall I'm impressed with the quality of this kit. Nicely detailed and the fit has been decent. There are plenty of worse kits that are far newer than this one.

Front suspension/crossmember subassembly together. This was a little tough as the gaps are a bit large and required generous amounts of C/A.

And here's the subassembly mated to the chassis. It's starting to look like something!

Here's the engine in an early state of assembly. I drilled 12 holes in the head so I can wire up the spark plug wires (this engine had two spark plugs per cylinder). I will also drill holes in the injector trumpets to add fuel lines from the Lucas injection system.

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